17 October 1448
The armies on Kosovo field
The armies meet on Kosovo field, the plain on which Murad I and Prince Lazar of Serbia were killed in 1389, near the tomb of Murad I. The Sitnica runs north through the field, and the Lab comes down from the north-east and joins it near Plemetina, below a line of low hills. Hunyadi believes that the main Ottoman army is still at Edirne, and he is taken by surprise when it appears before him on 17 October 1448. The accounts place his wagons on the hill at Plemetina, where he draws them up as a fort, and the Ottomans, who come up from the side of Priština, build a camp with a stockade of their own facing it.
Kosovo field seen from DrenocWikimedia Commons, Rinor Berisha1, CC BY-SA 4.0 (View of Kosovo field from Drenoc 1.jpg)
Modern estimates give the crusaders 22,000 to 30,000 men and the Ottomans 40,000 to 60,000, and Turkish historians put the Ottomans at about 40,000. Hunyadi’s main strength is his heavy horse, and the sources give him 800 to 2,000 war wagons, each with a gun. Murad commands the janissaries and the guns in the centre, and his son Mehmed, sixteen, leads the Anatolian troops on the right wing in his first battle. Hunyadi holds the crusader centre himself, and the Wallachians form his left wing.
Sources
- Laonikos Chalkokondyles, Histories (c. 1464).
- Johannes de Thurocz, Chronica Hungarorum (1488).
- Aşıkpaşazade, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osmân (late 15th century).
- Antonio Bonfini, Rerum Ungaricarum decades (about 1497).
- Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (1978).
- Jean W. Sedlar, East Central Europe in the Middle Ages, 1000–1500 (1994).
- Emanuel Constantin Antoche, “Hunyadi’s Campaign of 1448 and the Second Battle of Kosovo Polje (October 17–20)”, in Norman Housley (ed.), Reconfiguring the Fifteenth-Century Crusade (2017), 245–284.
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